Download Benetton, Advertising and Society

Advertising and society
Graham Murdock
Department of Social Sciences
Introduction
The Benetton campaigns caused public stir for almost two decades, until the
company finally touched upon a topic that was too much for the public and the
company’s profits. Their use of somewhat shocking imagery in the context of
advertising was something new to the advertising trade as well as to the public, and
managed to get Benetton’s advertisements banned in many countries time and time
again. The morality of using serious issues to promote sales of knitwear was seen as
outraging and immoral, but it also gained a lot of publicity for the company. This
essay attempts to explore the case of Benetton by first discussing the conventional
ways of advertising and then looking into the advertising of Benetton. It continues to
study the reasons behind people’s outrage at the advertisements and discuss
whether Benetton was making a “mockery” of serious issues.
Advertising as we know it
Advertising in its most traditional sense is a way of promoting a product, to make it
known to people and to persuade them to buy it. It can also be used to polish the
company image. In the case of governmental campaigns, advertising aims at
informing people about social issues and changing their attitudes and behaviour
(examples include anti-smoking campaigns and AIDS campaigns). One of the roles
of advertising is to differentiate the product from other similar ones in order to make it
more appealing to the audience. In order to find the right target audience for a
product, advertisers employ marketing research. This is to ensure that the
advertising appeals to those people who would be most likely to buy the product or
who would be the type of people the company wants as its customers, to retain a
certain image. (Brierley, 1995)
Nowadays advertising is not merely about promoting the sales of certain products,
but creating and adding images to products and furthermore, creating and promoting
brands and brand images. Advertisements for different globally recognised makes of
footwear, for example, rarely provide information on the qualities of the product itself,
but instead they attempt to convey different ideas of what the brand and product
represent, which the customer is invited to identify with. Thus carrying a certain label
on your shoe will tell other people what kind of a person you are, as they recognise
the brand and associate it with the “ideology” conveyed in the advertisements.
The visual landscape of advertising has become more and more provocative and
also controversial in the last two decades. In order to get noticed, advertisers need to
use imagery that will gain people’s attention. The images of naked bodies, in
conjunction of selling different products, both male and female, are beginning to be a
part of the visual scenery that people come across everyday, on billboards,
magazines and even television. Sexual imagery is hardly a taboo anymore, and it is
used to increase the sales of products from a variety of ranges.
However, there are still issues which in the context of advertising manage to raise
not only the interest and eyebrows of a few people, but strong disapproval and even
fury, of the people in this media and visual imagery saturated age. Benetton
campaigns did this for a number of years, bringing more and more “shocking”
images to the eyes of the public, in the frame of advertising for clothing. However
artistically acclaimed some of the advertisements were, they raised questions and
opinions about the role of advertising and the immorality of using imagery of for
example human suffering for promoting sales.
Stretching the limits: Benetton campaigns
The Benetton Group was founded in 1965, prior to which it had been a small family
company selling colourful knitwear. It has now grown to be an internationally
successful clothing company, whose turnover in 2004 was nearly 1,7 billion euros.
However, there has been a steady decrease in the company’s turnover from the 2
billion in 2000 (www.benetton.com). Its product line has expanded to include four
different brands, with the product range covering for example underwear,
accessories and perfumes, in addition the trademark knitwear. Although they
produce clothes for different target audiences, the emphasis has remained on young
people as the main customer group. It has been able to establish a brand that is
recognised in numerous countries around the world, mainly due to campaigns that
are easily identifiable as Benettons. This mainly thanks to the green logo. This is
very much due to the ideas and visions of Benetton’s now former creative director
Oliviero Toscani, who was given the sole authority to design Benetton’s campaigns
for 18 years.
When Toscani started with Benetton in the early 1980’s the campaigns did not differ
significantly from other fashion advertisements; the showed pleasant and happy
looking people wearing Benetton clothes, in other words Benetton’s approach was a
rather traditional and “simple” way of advertising. Toscani, eager to move away from
the use of professional models and conventional imagery, was the creative force
behind the launch of the United Colors –campaigns, showing people of different
ethnic backgrounds together, conveying the ideology of unity and equality of all
people, although these images have actually been criticised of reinforcing
stereotypes more than promoting tolerance (Wells 1997). However innocent those
ads may seem today, they raised controversy in countries sensitive to racial issues,
e.g South Africa. The United Colors of Benetton was the new slogan, that would be
repeated in white, on a green backgound, in the corners of advertisements. The logo
soon became the only feature in the United Colors campaigns to actually link the
advertisements with the product and the manufacturer.
Toscani’s advertisements adopted a new approach in the 1980’s when the clothes
were completely removed from the images, which dealt with issues such as war and
AIDS. One campaign featured a new born baby, another one, which raised great
controversy in the US, a black woman breast feeding a white baby (we can only see
the woman’s upper body). The culmination of Toscani’s work for Benetton was the
2000 campaign, which employed American prisoners as “models” and the slogan
“we, on death row”. It cost Benetton a contract with the American store chain Sears
and led to Toscani’s departure from the company.
Benetton’s advertising had stepped far away from what could be considered
traditional product and brand advertising. The product had been removed and
replaced with images that were usually seen in the context of news coverage and
documentaries. In fact, Toscani used photographs previously published in relation to
news coverage for some of the campaigns. Using this kind of imagery led many to
strongly disapprove of and disagree with what Benetton was doing, accusing them of
exploiting serious social issues and human suffering to promote their business and
increase sales. The Vatican based newspaper L’Osservator Romano stated that
“Benetton is making a mockery even of death”. The reaction is understandable,
however the issue is perhaps more complex than the accusations might lead to
believe. This kind of shock advertising might actually be a sign of a societal change
in the Western world, where consumption has become nearly a religion and
advertising is all around us.
Cold-blooded capitalism vs social consciousness
The dilemma of the Toscani’s Benetton advertisements seems to reflect people’s
attitudes towards advertising as something limited to the commercial world. Certain
issues have simply been excluded from advertising imagery, and placing them there
may well seem as mockery of those issues. However, Toscani seems to take his
work and his themes very seriously indeed, pressing the fact that these images are
seen on television screens every day, the only difference being that they are shown
in the context of news and documentaries. Instead of making a mockery, Benetton
claims that their advertising communicates social issues, giving them the publicity
they deserve. Toscani himself has appeared sincere in conveying his visions and his
personal views through Benetton’s advertising. The relationship between him and
Benetton has been suggested to have that of an artist and a patron, although there
later appeared to be a limit to the patrons tolerance of the art he was supporting.
Thus it could be argued that it is the linkage between business and these images of
the darker side of human life that causes the unease with Benetton advertisements,
and it is difficult to come to terms with this kind of advertising simply because it has
never been done before. People have their own “frame” of the world, and in that
frame, advertising is supposed to refrain from using the kind images that belong to
the news coverage imagery. Also many may feel that bringing these kind of issues
into the forum of advertising will actually make them less “shocking” in time and
easier to pass by and ignore, as people get used to seeing pictures like that even in
fashion advertisements. Tinic (1997) talks about the “commodification of social
issues” in her article on Benetton, stating that “…the significance of cultural problems
is perceived to be minimized or tainted by their association with the realm of
commerce”(5).
Perhaps the public also feels in a way betrayed or insulted because it did not ask to
see those pictures, and people find it upsetting that they actually are upset by them,
as O’Reilly states in his article “Advertising or exploitation”. The images come as a
surprise in a context where they were not expected, in advertising. However, Toscani
has repeatedly claimed that his work is not actually advertising and that he finds that
“The advertising industry has corrupted society” (Tinic 1997:9), and clearly the link
between the product and the advertisement has been missing in most of his
campaigns, however, it is the green logo that stands as a reminder that it is in fact a
“profit organisation” that is informing people about the dangers of AIDS or promoting
racial equality. As Tinic claims: “The implicit contradiction between the aims of public
service and the goals of commerce underlines the controversy created by Benetton
ad series” (1997:11).
The visual landscape of everyday life has changed radically as the consumer culture
has gained ground, and it could be argued that the time probably was ripe for the
Benetton campaigns, that in a way it was a logical step forward. The target audience
of Benetton, the youth of Europe, is actually rather aware and concerned about
social problems around them, and this kind of campaigning might be actually
something very easy to relate to for such an audience (and profitable for the
company). (Tinic 1997) Perhaps in the future social issues will become a more
common theme in advertising, as companies want to appear as the most caring and
aware (in some cases this kind of development is already in process), presenting
issues that the (young) consuming public are concerned about.
It could also be useful to consider the “sterility” of life in the 21st century as a reason
for people’s disapproval of Toscani’s pictures. People are not used to seeing the
beginning and ending of life, and all the evil that can happen in between, so close up
anymore as was the case in past centuries, when both ends usually took place at
home. It could be argued that people nowadays are estranged from the brutal
realities of the human life, to the extent that they are disgusted by a picture of a new
born baby and the images of death in process. By bringing these themes to a forum
where they are hard to avoid, Toscani has outraged people by showing them
something very essential of being human. Advertising as a medium for this, in turn, is
rather useful, since it probably reaches more people than for example exhibitions
would. It is also an essential part of our culture and popular culture, and therefore
actually a very logical medium for this kind of controversial imagery.
However, the fact that Toscani left (or was asked to leave) Benetton only after the
death row advertisements can not be overlooked, and it could be seen as the final
limit that cannot be crossed. However wide controversy the earlier campaigns raised,
Luciano Benetton stood by his artist’s side until it actually started to have a negative
impact on his business. This is a reminder of the cold realities of the consumer
culture, that ultimately the sales figures are what matters the most. In any case,
Benetton brought up an important issue of the role advertising in this age and time,
which rather than mockery, could be seen as a step forward in discussing important
social issues in the global village of the 21st century.
Conclusions
Benetton can be seen as either very cunning in its advertising operations, making
profits out of other peoples suffering and gaining free publicity in newspaper stories,
television and dinnertable conversations about its “shock ads”. Or it can be viewed
as a company with a conscience, aiming at bringing important issues to peoples
awareness and gaining sympathy and support to those in need. The imagery can be
seen as mockery or a healthy wake up call to modern western people, living lives
seemingly sheltered from war and disease. Either way, the fact that Benetton has
taken up the role of a pioneer in that kind of advertising and that the discussion
surrounding them has on its part unveiled the extremely important position of
advertising in society and also taken the idea of consumer culture to a new level,
which need not be seen as a negative step forward. In this sense, mockery is quite
far from what they are doing. In the next years it will be seen whether this step will
lead to a new kind of advertising culture or whether it was merely an “experiment”
that sprung some imitators but did not do enough to catalyst fundamental changes.
Bibliography
Briefly, Sean (1995) The Advertising Handbook. London: Routledge
O’Reilly, John, Advertising or exploitation? The Guardian, Sept. 21 1998
Ramamurthy, Anandi (1997) {Extract from} ‘Constructions of Illusion: Photography
and Commodity Culture’ in – Liz Wells (ed) Photography : A Critical Introduction.
London.Routledge, pp 188-198.
Tinic, Serra A. (1997) ‘United Colors and Untied Meanings: Benetton and the
Commodification of Social Issues’ Journal of Communication, Vol 47, No 3, Summer,
pp 3-25.